


Five Things about Gilda and Johnny. Or the Truth is what you make it.

by norabombay



Category: Gilda (1946)
Genre: Dark, F/M, Film Noir, M/M, World War II, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:32:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norabombay/pseuds/norabombay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gilda and Johnny have played this game before. They have never won.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things about Gilda and Johnny. Or the Truth is what you make it.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Frostfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frostfire/gifts).



**One**  
In a rundown San Diego neighborhood, filled with Mexicans and Oakies, she was Pauline. She wanted to be a dancer. Her father wanted her to share the money she was making from the kind of men who will pay cash to a fifteen year old Shirley Temple type they met on the street. As she walked out the door, face bruised and bleeding, he shouted, “Go be a whore like your bitch mother”.  
  
She didn’t look back as the flames started to lick the windows.  
  
 **Two**  
In Los Angeles, in a neighborhood that was filled with women who had once been the daughters of Oakies, she was Shirley.  She wanted to be an actress. She couldn’t play at  waitressing: too many dropped trays, too many rough men asking for her with commands in their voices, too many free coffees, too many cigarette breaks.  
  
She made double when she started to wear her hair in corkscrew blonde curls. One night she got offered $300 if she would come to a party and sing the lollipop song.  Richard took the $300 and pushed Shirley into the car.  
  
At the lollipop party, she met Johnny.  They were singing the same song and doing the same dance. The next time they worked the party together for twice the pay.  
  
They weren’t actors, but they were acting.  
  
 **Three**  
In a Los Angeles neighborhood filled with people who could almost convincingly lie about not being Oakies, she was Lorraine. Lorraine had black hair and a husband with a gun. They were from Pennsylvania.  Johnny had a done a good enough job of convincing Richard to let them go that he could stay a Farrell. There were a lot of Johnny’s in Los Angeles, he did the math, predicted the odds.  
  
Lorraine started to get cast as the chorus girl. She learned how to sing the songs, the words for the dance steps: the things that would get her from the back of the line to center stage. He learned how to roll the dice, how to shuffle the cards, and the best back alleys to find a sailor to spend time with.   
  
For a year they played house. Coffee and cigarettes together every morning before work, movies during the afternoons.  Johnny bought them a table, and painted the old chairs to match. Lorraine bought the fabric for curtains, and daydreamed about learning to sew.  
  
Lorraine talked about the children they would have one day, two boys and a girl. Dark hair like their father. The boys would own a construction company, and build offices and skyscrapers, covered in chrome and glory like the Empire State Building. The girl would marry well: maybe a lawyer, maybe a businessman. She would have a big house with three bedrooms and new furniture and a maid to do the cooking and the cleaning.  She would teach painting to the neighborhood children and go on holidays to the beach.  
  
Even when dreaming, Lorraine and Johnny didn’t dream big.  
  
December 1941 killed Johnny, Lorraine, and 2,803 American citizens.  Johnny won too much money with a pair of obvious dice. Johnny’s business partners let Richard’s business partners know where they were.  Johnny missed an insurance payment and was arrested on charges of oral copulation and sodomy.  Lorraine went to the station to bail him out, along with all the money she had saved for a car.  
  
They asked her for her marriage certificate.  
  
She told one of her fellow chorus girls about the police asking for a marriage certificate when she bailed Johnny out on “theft” charges. A lot of the girls had bailed their men out on charges. The girl told someone, who told someone, who knew one of the police. Lorraine was let go from the show the next day.  
  
Six people were killed when the apartment building burned to the ground, Lorraine and Johnny among them.  
  
 **Four**  
The war was with Japan, and Germany, and Italy. Action in the Pacific meant guaranteed employment at the docks, in the munitions factories, and on the ships.  The Navy was based out of San Francisco. Johnny had always liked sailors, and knew a few people temporarily in San Quentin. Might as well go where his past was going to die. Mame, back to a girlfriend, didn’t care where they were going so long as it was far enough from where they had been.  
  
Mame got a job singing at a nightclub, eight shows a week. She met a lot of powerful men, learned a new language. Money spoke differently to its own. Back to blonde again, she cooed and she flirted and she got what she wanted.  
  
Johnny got a job working the door at the casino in the hotel down the block. There were always men with war money to burn at games of chance. Johnny’s math was much better than it had been in Los Angeles.  
  
The housing shortage crammed them back into a single room. Rich men meant that they didn’t have to share the room with another couple. Johnny and Mame didn’t talk about children. They never had. They didn’t talk about the past they no longer had. But they loved each other and clung to each other as if they were the Maginot Line.  For all the newsreels and movies they attended in the afternoons, they knew nothing of Belgian geography.  
  
They made it two more years. Johnny moved on to work with ration cards and B stickers. Mame found cigarettes more profitable. The nightclub was full of smokers, transient officers and business men questioning the quality of the songs or the presence of entertainment. Mame wasn’t getting paid for her singing, and bad schemes go far when no one stays long enough to compare notes. 1943 was a year to make easy money if you knew how to please an American sailor.  Gilda and Johnny had moved up to the officer corps.  
  
Johnny Farrell did not have a birth certificate, but in 1944 he had a draft notice. Mame had asked one too many Lieutenant Commanders for money to ensure that she wouldn’t be having their baby.  Two of them offered to marry her, and it was sheer luck they were on the same ship. She vowed to make her own luck after that.  
  
That night she and Johnny lay in bed and discussed their future. They had failed to procure a 4F. The nightclub didn’t care how beautiful you were if armed officers shot each other in the front hall. And the casino had hired employees who were much better than Johnny at doing math.  
  
By dawn there were suitcases in the single room.  By noon there were passports, for an other,  other , Johnny Farrell, this one from Texas, and a red-headed woman named Gilda Waters. By dark there was a ship headed to the Panama Canal.  
  
Gilda bought a guitar for the journey.  
  
 **Five**  
The steamer took them to Panama. In Panama they switched to a neutral cruise ship full of Europeans. It was 1944, and probably for the best that neither of them knew any German geography.  
  
Six months in a small cabin in the sweltering bowels of a ship, in cramped hotel rooms in ports where you don’t speak the language and can’t ply your trade does not improve a relationship.  
  
As of Rio de Janiero, Johnny-and-Gilda were no more. They moved on to separate ships and better cabins. The films of Shirley Temple had been as popular in Europe as they were in America .

By the time that Gilda and Johnny met up again in Argentina, they spoke fluent German and were much better actors.


End file.
